I thought that I might cover a couple video games over the next few months with the same literary lens I’ve been using to look at comic books. And the first one I’ve decided to go with is Earthbound, a 1994 release for the Super Nintendo. That should come as little to surprise to Earthbound veterans, but I’m imagining that most people who read this blog, even some gamers, aren’t aware of this relatively obscure game. The first thing we have to talk about right out of the gate is the box.

The box is bigger than my head.

That shit don’t mess around. And when you’re a ten-year-old boy wandering around the local Electronics Boutique, that giant face-sized behemoth is going to stick out. The box is so big because the game comes with its own strategy guide and a John Waters-esque pack of odorama gross out cards. Imagine me in 1994 utterly captivated by this box, so foreign, so alien, the sleek golden curvature of that figure on its front practically demanding a purchase.

So what’s the premise? Earthbound is about a group of kids who band together to fight hippies, eat cheeseburgers, break up Heaven’s Gate style cults, beat people up with frying pans, put their souls into robots, and ride the Loch Ness Monster. It’s a Japanese Role Playing Game, and for anyone not unspeakably nerdy enough to know what that is, JRPGs are text based narratives where your only method of interaction is steering the avatar (the figure the player controls onscreen) and selecting actions from a text box. Think Myst fused with Dungeons and Dragons. And up until 1994, these games for the most part followed the same formula. Dragons and magic and swords and castles. Plucky young hero watches his village destroyed by an evil empire, then has to fight them to save the world.

What’s so noteworthy about Earthbound is that it takes place in the present (199X to be exact), and the avatars are average kids with yo-yos and baseball bats for weapons. They drink soda, not potions, to repelnish their health. They get money by using their fathers’ credit cards in ATM machines, not collecting golden coins from fallen enemies. They fight crazed neighborhood dogs, not dragons. They pal around with the Blues Brothers.

In 1994, this blew my fucking mind.

The aforementioned would be enough to make Earthbound noteworthy, just one in a line of excellent JRPGs released during the Super Nintendo era. But what pushes Earthbound over the edge from obscure gem into groundbreaking classic is the fact that it’s a satire, and it’s actually funny. Most people who play games acknowledge the fact that they’re funny. But games are rarely intentionally so. Games get chuckles when they have awful translations, not because of in-game jokes. Earthbound breaks that rule repeatedly. Sometimes you discover a trinket called “Insignificant Item” that does absolutely nothing. Other times you knock at someone’s door only to hear the hushed quotations of Beatles’ lyrics. If you approach a character called The Annoying Old Party Man you get one of these two messages: “The Annoying Old Party Man/Reveler grumbled about today’s youth” or “The Annoying Old Party Man/Reveler lectured you”. Mr. T makes a cameo. Sometimes, when fighting hippies, the game literally gives you this message: “The New Age Retro Hippie used a ruler! Now he can measure things more easily!” I’m not doing the game’s humor justice, because text can’t do the game justice. Its combination of offbeat soundtrack, Norman Rockwell-cum-Nintendo visuals, and insane story and dialogue in tandem are what make this game so truly bizarre and set apart from all the other deadly serious RPGs.

And did I mention the meta aspects of the game? Earthbound begins when an alien named Buzz Buzz (yes, Buzz Buzz) crash lands in the protagonist’s sleepy American town and explains to the young boy that he’s the inheritor of an important prophecy. This is typical JRPG crap, but Earthbound plays it off with style. Buzz Buzz alerts the player that he is critically injured and about to die, but after hearing his speech about what the game is about, he tells you he can explain it again if necessary, and in fact, can explain it an infinite amount of times despite being only seconds away from death. Multiple times throughout the game, the action will stop and a character onscreen will call to you (the real life sitting at home player, not the avatar) and ask you to take a picture of the avatars. At one point, they even ask you for your real life name and hint that they’re curious to know about the person who’s controlling them (again you) like a god-like figure in their 16-bit “lives”. And in the finale, the game asks you to send all your good karma to the protagonist so that he can defeat the final boss.

So meta. SO META!

And the ending? The ending. There’s no cut scene that finishes the game. The player has complete control and you’re free to roam around the massive game world where people thank you for playing or offer investment opportunities or chide you for missing school. There’s no true end other than turning off the power. And in 1994 this was truly memorable shit. Earthbound was the first game that made fun of itself for being a video game. Earthbound was the first game whose characters understood that they existed in a video game world, and they frequently commented on that fact.

I can’t imagine many people are going to rush out and play Earthbound after reading this (unless, like me, they’ve already played through it countless times). But like Bissell argues in Extra Lives, I think it’s important for the literary set to look at games and think about their narrative potential. They require a level of active participation that a book can never have (and that’s not a judgment on either medium). Bissell focuses much of his work on newer games, but my only true access point to gamer culture is fueled by nostalgia. Earthbound is the first game that truly made me aware of the storytelling capabilities within the video game, the first that made it clear that not everything had to follow the tired and culturally outdated “save the princess” plot line. And when I open up my Earthbound strategy guide and smell my Master Belch odorama card? Yeah. That’s a straight snort back to what it feels like to be ten-years-old again.

This reference is not lost on ten-year-olds.

Do I lose my writer card if I call Earthbound the Infinite Jest of 1994 Super Nintendo Japanese Role Playing Games?

I was a huge RPG nerd back in the day, so I tried to get as many of them as I could for holidays and birthdays. One of the great regrets of my life is selling my copies of Final Fantasy III, Chrono Trigger and Earthbound maybe 8 or 9 years ago. Huge mistake, but I have managed to track them all down again except for Earthbound. I’d kill to play that again on my SNES. Emulation never does it for me. Too much like masturbating. I want the real thing.

Easily one of my favorite videogames of all time–absolutely spectacular, especially within its concept of what the world was like. I recently played through it again on an emulator (used copies of the game go for like 90 bucks on eBay–I feel your pain in selling your SNES games) and it was just as amazing. I also love the concept of ‘videogame: a mixtape’–this makes the list. No spoilers, but the final boss fight is pretty mindblowing.

The best part of this game is when you unearth the magazine (I can’t remember where). You have the option to read the story inside–it’s a long confession about how the writer, after being caught speeding, tells the cop that his girlfriend is pregnant and they’re on the way to the hospital. I’ll escort you, the cop says. You can’t, the panicked writer says. It’s a…it’s a demon baby! Or something like that.

Also, I haven’t listened to them in about five years, but I remember some of the Earthbound music remixes on ocremix.org being pretty good. They’re familiar enough that you’ll get nostalgia’d but new enough to be fresh.

This is one of a series of NES/SNES roms that I encountered in late adolescence that shamed 90% of what was on out on the PS1, my first JRPG console (I’d only played action/sports games on the Genesis before)–Lufia, FFIII-IV, Chrono Trigger, Earthbound & Mother (with an English-language patch). Mother 3 is out, too, but good luck finding a translated cart–your only shot is emulation.

I remember I’d rushed out to buy SCEA’s beautiful/stupid RPG Legend of Dragoon and in my disenchantment turned to CT. Then when Xenosaga was totally not Xenogears, was in fact less of a game (one of whose principals was a mousy android named MEME. yeah. like that.) than a hourlong cutscene every time I sat down to play it, Earthbound was the antidote. This has continued well into adulthood–FFXIII was a prelude to browsing SNES auctions on eBay.

But I have no “original” experience the way you do, and the physical item doesn’t matter to me. In fact, since I learned these games on a computer, I’m a little disoriented when I play them on a TV.

A fantastic game to start with, bravo! While I’m sure you’ll be continuing on into other genres, I’m getting some serious cravings to crank out my SNES once more and play some Chrono Trigger, Lufia 2, Terranigma (did anyone else ever play this game, I’ve had a bloody hard time finding anyone that did–total mindfzck of an ending), Illusion of Gaia, etc.

Thanks for the nostalgia trip, I’ll be checking back in for the rest of the series!

I looooove this game so much, I remember reading about it in nintendo power and dragging my parents so I could buy it with lawnmowing money XD
And it totally delivered too, I’ve probably played it through 10+ times by now.

What about Thes Secret of Monkey Island and other Lucas Arts games?
I don’t know if you intentionally left it out or just plain forgot it (if so, how could you?)
I realise it’s not an rpg, but you say
“Earthbound was the first game that made fun of itself for being a video game. Earthbound was the first game whose characters understood that they existed in a video game world, and they frequently commented on that fact.”
And considering Monkey Island did that 4 years earlier, it’s simply not true 😉

Unfortunately I have to admit that I never had the chance to play Earthbound, as it never was released in Europe. After reading your article I feel compelled to try it out though 😉